I decided to move my company emails over to Google Apps a month or so back, lets face it, the spam filter is great, it works with the iPhone and now syncs with Microsoft Outlook. What I didn’t expect was poor support, slow responses from Google staff manned forums and a month of pulling my hair out.
Here’s the plan, create a Standard account, setup my 2 user email addresses within the Standard account and then simply upgrade to the Premier account to allow Outlook Sync to work.
Things didn’t go to plan, on logging in, I found that I had already setup my domain on a Team account, no problem, I read the forums, all I needed to do was verify my domain and it would automatically change to a Standard account, I verified the domain, all straight forward but……. my account didn’t change to the expected standard account but stayed as a Team account.
Back to the forums and followed several posts instructing me how to change over including one that said, create a new user, give that user admin rights, delete the other users and then verify the account again on the new user, nothing seemed to work.
I posted my own question on the Google forums which was answered a few days later by a Google employee who posted that my account has now been changed over, great I thought, I just need to recreate the users I deleted and away I go, no no no, it takes 5 days for deleted users to be removed from the account says the Google help.
So, I waited for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 days and still my deleted users are listed in my account so I can’t recreate them, back to the forums, it seems there are quite a few people with the same problem, enough it seems that Google have pinned a thread on the forums asking people to fill in there details and they will work through them, days later I had still not heard anything from Google either from the form I filled in or a reply to my question in the forums.
I read through the Google Apps site again and noticed that if you had a Premier account you get 24/7 telephone support, great, just what I need, so I upgraded my Standard account to a Premier account, luckily Google offer a 30 day trial as my account still showed 5 users, 4 deleted users and the made up Admin account I’m currently using.
Logging in on my new Premier account I clicked on users and noticed that by my deleted users it said suspended, so I selected all these users and clicked delete, I logged out and back in and noticed that now the only account was my made up Admin account, whoo hoo I’m getting somewhere, I then stopped the 30 day trial before my card got credited for 5 accounts that I didn’t want and logged out.
Logging back in to my now once again Standard account I finally thought that I was getting somewhere, time to create my user accounts and get it started, guess what, I was wrong, it now said that the accounts I was trying to setup have recently been deleted and I must wait for these to clear before I can recreate them.
So, as it stands I’m almost a month into changing over and still no where near ready, I will now have to wait at least 5 days for the accounts to be deleted before I can recreate them, then I will have to make one of the accounts a admin and delete the made up current admin account, then wait at least 5 days for that to clear before I can upgrade to the Premier account as not to be charged with 3 users instead of the 2 users I require, I’m beginning to think hosted Exchange is the way to go.
